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09/20/2024 | News release | Distributed by Public on 09/21/2024 05:02

Novelist Jayne Anne Phillips Delivers Ha Jin Lecture Tuesday

Novelist Jayne Anne Phillips Delivers Ha Jin Lecture Tuesday

Author will discuss and read from her 2024 Pulitzer Prize winner Night Watch

"A novel first occurs to me as language in a specific voice, in a specific scene," says Jayne Anne Phillips, who began writing poetry before turning her attention to short stories, and later, novels. Photo by Elena Seibart

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Novelist Jayne Anne Phillips Delivers Ha Jin Lecture Tuesday

Novelist Jayne Anne Phillips Delivers Ha Jin Lecture Tuesday

September 20, 2024
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In her Pulitzer-winning novel Night Watch, author Jayne Anne Phillips returns to a theme that has long preoccupied her fiction: the lingering trauma that wars inflict on survivors long after the last battle has ended.

Night Watch opens in 1874, nearly a decade after the Civil War ended. A 12-year-old girl named ConaLee and her mother, who is unable to speak, arrive at an asylum in West Virginia, deposited there by a man known only as "Papa," a violent, sadistic veteran, who has insinuated himself into their lives. The novel cuts back and forth between 1874 and 1864, tracing their stories and their efforts to reclaim their lives against a landscape ravaged physically and psychologically by the war.

Night Watch was awarded this year's Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The book is the third in a remarkable trilogy of novels that began in 1985 with Phillips' acclaimed Machine Dreams,which chronicles a West Virginia family shaped by World War II and the Vietnam War, followed by 2009's Lark and Termite, set during and in the years following the Korean War.

Together, the three books offer a searing reminder that all wars are atrocities, that lives are irreparably altered in their wake, often for generations.

"Night Watch is a war novel not because it's 'about' war, but because the characters must deal with a world that's falling apart around them," says Phillips, who will read from and discuss the book when she delivers the annual Ha Jin Visiting Lecture at BU Hillel on Tuesday, September 24, at 7:30 pm.

Phillips first earned notice as a short story writer in 1979, with the publication of Black Tickets (Delacourt/Seymour Lawrence), when she was just 26. A second collection, 1988's Fast Lanes, cemented her reputation as one of the country's most talented writers.

But Phillips says she prefers working in longer narrative form. "I wanted the deeper mystery of the novel," she says.

This past May, Night Watch (Knopf, 2023), her sixth novel,won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. In their citation, the Pulitzer judges lauded the book as "a beautifully rendered novel."

BU Today spoke with Phillips about the craft of writing, her ongoing fascination with history, the parallels between the Civil War and the present, and her reaction to winning the Pulitzer Prize.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q&A

with Jayne Anne Phillips

BU Today:How did the idea for Night Watch come to you?

Phillips:The idea had been gestating between the lines of my books probably starting with Machine Dreams, but the emergency of the present led me to look back into history-I really can't see a history to come-into the pasts we've survived and the shadows looming over us. But all that was miasma, nonspecific desire, until I found a voice and witness in the beginning pages of Night Watch.

BU Today:You've described yourself as a "slow, painstaking writer." What is your writing process?

Phillips:A novel first occurs to me as language in a specific voice, in a specific scene. The scene or monologue implies a history just as it implies the whole story of the book I've only begun, a book that is still a mystery to me. Sometimes the beginning of a novel shows up in the middle of a completed book, but Night Watch began with its beginning: the voice of a 12-year-girl, long the adult in her family, as she's hurried into a buckboard for a journey she can't begin to imagine.

BU Today:Reading Night Watch and your description of the trauma and dislocation in the wake of the Civil War, one can't help notice similarities between then and now and the cyclical nature of history. You've said you want readers to "feel the connection to history which we are doomed to repeat." Can you talk about that?

Phillips:I wrote about civil war between North and South Vietnam in Machine Dreams and about civil war between North and South Korea (a rehearsal for Vietnam) in Lark and Termite. Though I wrote other books between and after these, I was thinking about a trilogy that would conclude with a novel that would try to represent our own civil war. Civil wars are the wars in which a country ravages itself, explodes its history, and the legacies of these wars can last 200 years. Wars are begun by politicians and generals who don't know who they're killing, and don't care. Now we hear the term "civil war" thrown around, called for, mythologized by the far right, but war is an elemental force that, once begun, operates like hundreds of wildfires so vast they make their own weather. Fiction is time travel, in that human beings think in narrative. I've always said that history tells us the facts (as the victor writes them), but literature tells us the story.

BU Today:The novel is a fascinating exploration of erasure-some of the characters are unable to recall their past lives, others have been forced to accept an alias, still others have no name at all, just that conferred on them by others. What about this subject did you find so compelling?

Phillips:Your name is the first thing taken from you by an entity trying to "other" or dehumanize you. Your name is what a similar entity uses to find you if you are trying to conceal yourself. War is the ultimate dehumanization, the ultimate disrespect of individuals. "Say his name," "Say her name" demands recognition of a self, a life. Yet I also wanted to call out, in the long, deep wash of history, those nameless, forgotten people who operate in the privacy of their own lives to protect those they love, no matter the threat or loss to themselves.

Much of Phillips' novel isset at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, W.V. The facility opened in 1874 and at the time, was considered revolutionary for the innovative, compassionate care it provided to patients with mental illness. Today, the facility is a National Historic Landmark and is open to the public. Photo courtesy of West Virginia Archives and History

BU Today:Much of the story occurs at a real place-the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum-which is not far from where you grew up and is now a National Historic Landmark. Were you familiar with its history before you began work on Night Watch?

Certainly everyone in my hometown knew about what was then called the Weston State Hospital. It was horribly overcrowded by the time it shut down, like many of its ilk, in the early '70s. My Civil War-era research revealed a very different asylum and methods of treatment that were revolutionary then and now. The central irony of Night Watch is that during the brutal post-Civil War years, the asylum offered refuge and healing in a chaotic, dangerous world.

BU Today:One of the novel's characters is the real-life Quaker physician Thomas Story Kirkbride. How did you discover his story?

As I researched medical treatment during the Civil War era, I came upon a thin volume published in 1854 called On the Construction, Organization, and General Arrangements of Hospitals for the Insane, by physician/superintendent Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride, who directed the Hospital for the Insane in Philadelphia. From the 1850s through the 1880s, he was the most influential mental health professional in America. At the time, every state was encouraged to provide for its insane, both rich and poor, and Kirkbride's book instructed on the building of vast asylums, down to the smallest detail. The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, for example, enclosed nearly nine acres of interior space, but each patient was to have a private room with two windows and an ample transom over the door. He decreed that these very large asylums house no more than 250 patients and recommended "moral treatment" that was essentially humane treatment for the insane. Kirkbride used isolation for disturbed patients rather than restraints. I loved that his middle name was Story, a word that helps open Night Watch, and I invented a nephew, Dr. Thomas Kirkbride Story, who is mentored and trained by his famous uncle and becomes physician superintendent of the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum just a few years before ConaLee and her mother arrive there as patients.

BU Today:What additional research did you undertake in the writing of the book?

Phillips took this photo of what would have been a patient's room at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum during one of her several visits for researching the book. Photo by Jayne Anne Phillips

I stopped writing Night Watch several times to devote myself to research-on every aspect of life in the years after the war, and on the war itself. The preindustrial world of unspoiled West Virginia in the high mountains, the way people lived and spoke, the slow run-up to the war, walking and photographing the fields on which the Battle of the Wilderness took place, poring over the war diaries and letters of the women at home, the generals, and the enlisted infantry, perusing-nearly memorizing-innumerable books of photographs, visiting the asylum itself, photographing rooms and staircases in both the restored central building and the "ruins" on the site, made Night Watch real to me.

BU Today:You began your writing career as a poet. Has that informed the way you approach writing fiction?

Failed poets can make great novelists, or perhaps I should say that failed poets often write novels I want to read. There is the attention to every line and phrase, the weight of the words and syllables in strong, tensile sentences that establish physicality but can move inward or outward in a controlled spiral. I moved from writing poems to writing the one-page fictions in Sweethearts [Truck Press, 1976] and Counting [Vehicle Editions, 1978]. I think I learned a sense of structure in writing these very compressed pieces in which every word matters, "story" is nonlinear, and time is fluid.

BU Today:This is your sixth novel and eighth book. Do you find that writing gets easier with each new book?

Sadly, I find that writing gets harder. That's as it should be, really, as one should always be attempting more, risking more, going deeper. As another writer once told me, "My new book doesn't know I wrote the other books."

BU Today:You won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in May for Night Watch. What was that moment like for you?

It was a little surreal. Part of the delight of being retired from my day job (teaching and academic administration) is that I don't need to check my email constantly. Sometimes I let it slide to be more present for my "real" work. I was at home alone and happened to check my email before going out to transplant astilbe in my balcony garden. A message from my editor's assistant read, "You won the Pulitzer!" I was about to reply "??" but noticed a few other emails just below. They simply said "Congratulations!" in the subject line. Then, immediately, my editor at Knopf, Ann Close, phoned me. She was so pleased for me, and I for her-she'd put off retirement to see Night Watch through publication, and we'd been sending the manuscript back and forth for six or seven years. She was absolutely over the moon.

Jayne Anne Phillips will deliver this year's Ha Jin Visiting Lecture on Tuesday, September 24, at 7:30 pm, at Boston University Hillel, River Room, 213 Bay State Road, fourth floor. The event is free and open to the public and will be followed by a reception.

The Ha Jin Visiting Lecturer series, made possible by a gift from former BU trustee Robert J. Hildreth, brings internationally renowned fiction writers to BU to teach master classes and give public lectures. The series is named for award-winning novelist Ha Jin (GRS'93), a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor and a College of Arts & Sciences professor of creative writing.

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  • John O'Rourke

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    John O'Rourke began his career as a reporter at The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. He has worked as a producer at World Monitor, a coproduction of the Christian Science Monitor and the Discovery Channel, and NBC News, where he was a producer for several shows, including Now with Tom Brokaw and Katie Couric, NBC Nightly News, and The Today Show. John has won many awards, including four Emmys, a George Foster Peabody Award, and five Edward R. Murrow Awards. Profile

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